Fraudulent
Stock Tweets Result In Civil and Criminal Charges For Scottish Man

A Scottish man is facing
civil and criminal
charges for allegedly tweeting multiple false statements about two
companies that caused significant drops in the stock prices of those
companies and even triggered a trading halt in one of the companies.
James Alan Craig, 62, is a Scottish resident who is accused of
creating two Twitter accounts that closely resembled two well-known
established securities research firms in an effort to profit from an
anticipated downward movement in the stock prices when the tweets
became publicized. In parallel actions announced today, both the
Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Justice
announced civil and criminal charges, respectively, against Craig.
Ironically,
Craig’s attempt to profit from the false tweets ultimately netted
him less than $100.

The incompetence continues. Significantly
overstating the scope of a breach is almost as bad as understating.
You might frighten customers, board members, or stockholders into
overreacting.

Two breaches seemed small and innocuous
at the time, but weren’t. A timely reminder why entities should
notify even when they think risk is low.

Thomas Fox-Brewster reports:

In 2009 and 2010 two separate attacks hit
widely-used online gambling payments processors Moneybookers
and Neteller.
Though they initially appeared innocuous, it now seems both attacks
saw millions of users’ private data – addresses, emails,
telephone numbers, birth dates and, in the case of Neteller, answers
to password hints – fall into criminal hands. The
details are only now being made public by Optimal
Payments, the London-based owner of both Moneybookers
(now Skrill) and Neteller,
after disclosure from FORBES. The
company is now reinvestigating the hacks and the possibility of
further breaches.

In the first such case against a U.S.
cable company, federal regulators are slapping Cox Communications
with a $595,000 fine after Cox allowed hackers from Lizard
Squad to penetrate its systems and steal private customer
information.

By posing as an IT administrator and
tricking a couple of Cox employees into giving up their login
credentials, a hacker known as “EvilJordie” broke into Cox’s
databases and gained access to customer names, addresses, password
recovery information and even “partial” Social Security numbers
and driver’s license numbers, according to the Federal
Communications Commission. They also got hold of some customers’
telephone records.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) will
take on the issue of online privacy in the “next several months,”
Chairman Tom Wheeler said during an interview with Charlie Rose this
week.

He said the agency’s action would address the
privacy practices of Internet service providers and how they are
protecting the information of their customers.

“In
other words, do I know what information is being collected?” he
said. “Do I have a voice in whether or not that is going to be
used one way or another? And those are two very important baseline
rights that individuals ought to have.”

At another point he said, “I’ve told the
Congress and others you will see us in the next several months
addressing the question of privacy.”

Brieana Rose (not her real name) could
not have been more vulnerable. Unconscious on an operating table,
having gynaecological surgery to see whether she had cancer.

She could never have known that one of
the people charged with looking after her would instead take
advantage of her, violating her trust by taking a photo of her
genitalia and showing the photo to others.

The experience has not only taken a
financial and emotional toll, but it has revealed a huge gap in
medical and privacy law in NSW.

[…]

The nurse left the hospital and was hired
by another, and currently has nothing on her publicly available
record to indicate what she did. Brieana
was also unable to legally force her to provide her phone for
forensic analysis – because that would be a violation of the
nurse’s privacy – and the hospital had no control over their
former employee.

This is a disgusting situation, and yes, the laws
in NSW need to change. Not only does the nurse need to be
disciplined by her licensing board, but the patient should have the
right to sue for the privacy violation and emotional distress caused.

On 15th October 2015 the
Spanish Supreme Court handed down its first ruling[1]
on the so-called digital “right to be forgotten” in which it
states that harmful information affecting individuals without public
relevance should not be accessible to Internet search engines when
the news has lost relevance over time.

The
background of the case

The decision of the Court is based on the
following facts: in the 1980s two people were involved in
drug-trafficking and consumption. After being arrested, they were
finally convicted for drug smuggling and imprisoned. A few years
ago, after having served their sentence imposed for these facts and
having remade their personal, family and professional life, they
found out that by typing their names in the major Internet search
engines (particularly, Google and Yahoo!), the news that once was
published in a newspaper (El País) now appeared among the first
search results, because such newspaper had digitized their library.

…According to a report
by the Financial Times, some of the top credit rating companies are
now using people’s social media accounts to assess their ability to
repay debt. So if you want to be able to qualify for a loan and
borrow money, this is just another reason to avoid saying certain
things on Facebook.

“If
you look at how many times a person says ‘wasted’ in their
profile, it has some value in predicting whether they’re going to
repay their debt,” Will Lansing, chief executive at credit rating
company FICO, told
the FT. “It’s not much, but it’s more than zero.”

…
The full
text of the Trans Pacific-Partnership (TPP) international trade
agreement — some eight years in the negotiating — was published
online earlier today (in a version marked “subject to legal
review”), after agreement was reached between the 12 countries
early last month, which include the U.S., Australia, Canada, Japan
and New Zealand.

The text still needs to be ratified in the
individual countries before the treaty becomes binding.

“The E-Commerce
chapter has serious implications for online privacy,” said
Peter Maybarduk, of non-profit consumer rights organization, Public
Citizen, in a statement on TPP. “The text reveals that
policies protecting personal data when it crosses borders could be
subject to challenge as a violation of the TPP.”

Public Citizen says the agreement puts a
requirement on countries to allow
unregulated cross-border transfer of Internet users’ data
and prohibits governments from requiring companies host data on local
servers — with what it says is no express protection for privacy
and data protection policies to be exempted from the rules.

Eventually, everyone will move to a single fiber
optic cable (owned by the city?) that delivers TV, phone, Internet
and any other digital signals (like burglar alarms)

… The head of the company announced last week
that Time Warner will test an online service that gets rid of the
cable box and could pave the way for introduction of smaller, more
affordable programming packages.

… The no-box test is expected to begin next
week in New York, a Time Warner spokesman told me. People with a Roku
streaming-video device will be able to access Time Warner's
programming via an app similar to Netflix's or Hulu's.

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About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.